Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to instant messaging in a collaborative computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
The recent rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of synchronous, real-time collaboration able to fulfill the real-time communicative requirements of the modern computing participant. Using the Internet or a corporate intranet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in real-time in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing.
To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of synchronous messaging technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These synchronous messaging technologies include several, real-time human-to-human collaborative environments such as instant messaging and persistent chat rooms. The common messaging space can accommodate a pair of users to a chat, or multiple users to a conference. In some circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be spontaneous upon one user's recognizing the presence and availability of a partner user. In other circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be planned and can even subsist in a calendared event in a calendaring and scheduling system.
Amongst often used collaborative components in a collaborative environment, instant messaging remains of paramount importance. In instant messaging systems, users are provided with instant messaging client software, which allows them to communicate via an instant messaging server with other users. Although instant messaging systems allow users to communicate with each other in real-time, these existing instant messaging systems have several deficiencies with regard to automatically logging a chat transcript that contains multi-modal communication, such as text and voice in one conversation.
In this regard, when involved in a chat session, a user may converse with another user by providing a combination of text and audio messages in the chat session. Switching to voice chatting during a textual chat session can be preferred when chatting about a complex subject that may be too cumbersome to communicate by text alone. Once the chat session has ended, users may refer to a chat transcript for the conversation at any time. The chat transcript can include a textual chat log archive that displays the whole chat session in textual format based upon time-stamps. Necessarily, the chat transcript excludes any audio portion of the chat session. Rather, at best the audio portion of the chat session is stored separately from the chat transcript in an audio file.